Can Someone Please Explain This Silent Marshes Puzzle To Me?

Because I have no idea. Alright, so here's a picture of the puzzle.

Clear enough what you're supposed to do, right? Hit the keys in order, matching the image next to the number to a related image on a key. Couldn't be simpler, right? So let's go over them-

1 - Match the Sun to the Flower.
2 - Match the Spider to the Fly.
3 - Catch the Chicken to the Egg.
5 - Match the Wave to the Boat.

Which brings me to '4'. By process of elimination, I know where the bat goes with key number 2, but what the hell is that? An onion? A fist of garlic?

That's the closest I could come to, but I'm still baffled by it - you know that garlic has no associations with bats, right? It's just vampires that are afraid of garlic, not bats. It's just puzzling, especially since there's no trend making them clear.

Suns feed flowers. Spiders eat flies. Hens lay eggs. Boats ride on waves. Bats... are afraid of garlic?

So strange.

The Amazing Mistranslations of Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age, Presented in Ascending Order of Absurdity

There's no denying it - Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age features some terrible attempts at presenting a game in English. So I've collected three examples of just how bad it is - there are many, many more, but I think these illustrate just how crazy things get.

This one borderline makes sense to me. It's a pipe, run that through some kind of translation program, I can see it winding up as 'tube'. That's fine. This next one makes a little less sense.

How? How does one go from 'Bow Tie' to 'Butterfly'? Are there similarities to those two words in Russian? When they're spelled phonetically in Cyrillic? This one is just bizarre. But not as strange as-

Yeah. Baffling. An electrical shock warning sign becomes 'ZIPPER'. This is so nuts it doesn't even seem like a translation thing, more like someone associated the wrong word with the wrong file. Just crazy.

How Did This Happen? Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age Edition

Please take a look at this picture and see if you can spot what I found so bizarre.

Yes, that's it. The bucket of fish. Can we get a closeup of that, please?

Wow. How did that end up as a finished part of a game that was released for sale? Did someone forget to replace a temp image with the actual one? Is this a 'take your daughter to work day' thing, where a 4-year-old wanted to get a picture in her parent's game?

That last option would be the only way I would find this acceptable.

Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age

Set somewhere in Scandinavia, Insane Cold posits a fascinating premise - what if, for no clear reason, Frost Giants were to return and just start wrecking the place? Well, obviously it would be up to one man, armed with a magical amulet - which he has for no clear reason - to save the souls of their victims and use said spirits as a weapon against the evil giants from the ancient past. So yeah, nothing about this game makes much sense. Also, it's shoddily produced in a number of ways! But hey, forget my negativity, let's move on to a more concrete system of judging hidden object games - the HOG Criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Oh my god do they ever. This game is set literally minutes after Frost Giants swooped in and started causing a fuss, but literally every hidden object screen looks like a pile of garbage with barely coherent themes. Yes, the hospital areas are mostly filled with medical supplies, and the aquarium is 50% fish stuff and 50% pirate things, but by and large, generic items are scattered all about in the hopes of cluttering up the screens even further. Worse, every HOS must be searched twice, but the game does not permanently remove all of the items stripped away on the first visit, leaving players without an advantage - or really any satisfaction - on their second visit.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

It's the standard 'you want one thing, find 19 others' premise most games use - but even that simple gameplay dynamic seems to have confused the heck out of the developers, because they botch it in a number of ways. First there's the decision to not let players see all the items they're looking for at once - at any given time they're only allowed to look for six items, which is just absurdly small. Then there's the weird font the developers have chosen, which makes actually reading the names of various items surprisingly difficult. Not that it matters, since multiple translation failures wind up putting a completely wrong word onscreen. How on earth does the game expect players to see the word 'butterfly' onscreen and expect them to know they should be clicking on a bow tie? Just a mess all over, people.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

The puzzles are at least a high point. There are some memory games, gravity puzzles, and a couple which fall under the broad 'draw a line between points without backtracking' category. They sort of make sense within the game world, so long as one doesn't think about it too hard. The game is very bad, on the other hand, at keeping a clear path in the player's mind and letting them know what they're supposed to to next. More times than I could count I'd find myself finished a set of rooms and then left completely baffled as to what was expected of me - invariably, the answer would be 'backtrack until a new HOS appears and you get a new item'. This is the exact reason that HOG developers started putting interactive maps in their game, and I didn't for a second hesitate to abuse the hint button in striving to discover which direction to follow.

Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age isn't a very good HOG - there are plenty of decent HOG screens - including a standout set around a doll's house filled with cute animals, but the technical errors keep them from ever being effectively entertaining. As a story it's competently enough told, but there's nothing interesting enough to keep an English-speaking audience enthralled through sub-par gameplay.

Also, don't go to the ball-carrying statue puzzle at the back left of the first hospital screen until the hint button tells you to - a glitch can make it so it's impossible to leave the puzzle, and if you don't have the yellow ball necessary to solve it, you might have to quite the game! So... yikes.

Insane Cold: Return to the Ice Age is available from Gamehouse!

If you'd like to play along with my oft-times frustrating trip back to the Ice Age, just click here to load the playlist!

The Curse of Silent Marshes

Right up top, just seconds into the opening movie, there's an evil clown. I can't stress enough how much goodwill that clown buys the game's developers from my point of view. I don't think of myself as an especially biased reviewer - there are game design elements that I'm partial to or disgusted by, but never without well-reason caused. Certain aesthetic choices, on the other hand, so fundamentally tweak my interests that I will forgive quite a bit of nonsense in order to see them implemented. Killer Klowns are very high on the list of things that can cause me to turn a blind eye towards a game's flaws. Which The Curse of Silent Marshes absolutely requires.

On to the Hidden Object judging criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

I'll be honest - it's pretty bad. Items are tossed around the screen with no regard to any kind of basic logic. This is a game where you'll find a globe, a teddy bear, and a set of knitting paraphernalia in the back of a pickup truck. Damned if I could explain why. There aren't very many screens in the game, either, which is a bit of a disappointment, since, other than their lack of logic or order, they're actually fairly smooth to navigate. All of the names are accurate and the items don't cheat on size or the rules of gravity. That might be damning with faint praise, but it's not nothing.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

The searches follow the standard 10 for 1 logic of loading the item list with nonsense to stretch things out. This isn't unexpected, of course, but it's always annoying. At least the game's story, in which Anna, the main character, must rescue her friends from the clutches of an evil clown who has used voodoo to trap them in a dream world, has the kind of batty logic that would send someone scrambling through storage closets hoping that odds and ends could save the day.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

The magical premise solidly establishes the kind of logic players are expected to bring to the game, so it's never jarring to be asked to break a doll out of a crystal ball, or use river water to erase the chalk which is creating a magical barrier. The contained location also keeps the player's journey at the forefront of their mind - right at the top Anna knows her goal is to free her friends and escape town, and every step she takes is a clear move in that direction. That's not to say all of the puzzles are fantastic; a few of them are so oblique that I was forced to lean on the hit button - who on earth sees a set of wire cutters hanging from an overhead cable and thinks 'I know, I'll shoot a flare at them!'. The game's story also ends in a frustratingly abrupt fashion - after spending a lot of time setting up the villain's backstory and motivation, I was sad to see no real resolution for any of the characters - just a 'well, that's over' once the final puzzle was solved.

The Curse of Silent Marshes may not be the Silent Hill rip-off I was hoping it would be, and it never bothers to explain why a voodoo-empowered villain chooses to dress as an evil clown, rather than a skeleton man or something - but I still found the game interesting to play. It's quite short, clocking in at just under two hours, and there aren't very many hidden object screens - each one must be visited twice to stretch things out a little. Still, beyond a few buggy puzzles and bizarre narrative leaps, this is a game with small ambitions which more than meets them.

The Curse of Silent Marshes is available from Gamehouse!

If you'd like to play along with my journey through Silent Marshes, you can find the Youtube playlist here!

Brink of Consciouness: Dorian Grey Syndrome

Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Gray Syndrome is one of the most effective horror Hidden Object Games I've ever come across. The plot opens when the main character's girlfriend is kidnapped by the twisted serial killer who has been preying on the city's beautiful young people. The main character is a reporter chronicling the case, and this has drawn the madman's attention - the only hope he has of saving his girlfriend's life is to travel to the villain's mansion and play the madman's game.

It's a solid premise for any horror story, and BoC:DGS' developers do it justice with truly solid scripting. The villain contacts the main character through the game via loudspeakers he's set up in every room of his house, pontificating about the nature of love and sacrifice, and valiantly attempting to justify all of the murders he's committed. It's all incredibly solid stuff, and along with diary pages scattered about the house informing the killer's backstory, and surprisingly a well-written journal that tracks the player's trek through the mansion, it offers one of the genre's high points, from a storytelling standpoint.

Now for the HOG criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

BoC does a great job of making its HOS fit within the world of the game. The whole thing is set in the dilapidated mansion of a maniac, so a certain degree of clutter is to be expected, but it never gets so stacked with random nonsense that it seems preposterous. An especially nice note is that the game is set in the 1950s, and the developers were very careful to only use period items in the hidden object screens. There aren't any digital watches lain across phonographs, or anything along those lines. Okay, there's a colour television at one point, but that's really the only anachronistic lapse.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

Only in the barest sense. Conforming quite neatly to the industry standard, BoC has screens where the player is asked to pick up one item they actually need, along with a dozen that don't matter, for no particular reason. The screens are fair and entertaining to play, but it would have been nice to see the developers go that extra mile to ensure that they made sense within the story.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

BoC does a great job of creating a world where this kind of searching a puzzle-solving make sense. Oscar, the game's masked villain, is a baroque psychopath who enjoys toying with his prey - of course he'd construct elaborate puzzles for them to solve in his huge mansion. Even the puzzles are generally more practical than is normal for the genre. They tend to feel more like minigames and activities than actual brain-teasers - for the most part, whenever a lock needs to be picked or a chest opened, players are simply assigned a complex task to perform and then expected to follow the clear instructions on how to complete it. While it may not end up as challenging as some games, this certainly puts BoC among the most user-friendly HOGs I've encountered.

With its great setting and exceptional writing, Dorian Gray Syndrome stands apart from the HOG crowd as a title that even players unfamiliar with the genre can find extremely accessible. It's just too bad that it doesn't push the envelope in gameplay design as well, satisfying itself with utterly traditional hidden object screens. While it may not be reaching for the stars, BoC still manages to stand well above most of its contemporaries, providing a chilling adventure along with some merely solid puzzles.

Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Grey Syndrome is available on Steam

Space Legends: At the Edge of the Universe

I was excited to take a look at Space Legends - Edge of the Universe because it seemed to be that rarest gem among the HOG genre - a hidden object adventure set in an outright sci-fi millieu. With most HOGs leaning towards supernatural horror, crime-solving, or some kind of fantasy/faery nonsense, Space Legends seemed like it would be a breath of fresh air. Little did I realize how quickly things would take a turn for the bizarre and inept.

The game starts off promisingly enough, establishing the main character as part of a two-person research team investigating a far-away planet. After a storm severly damages the station, the base, it's up to the main character to stabilize her love interest's injuries, gather their data, and fly back to Earth for medical assistance. This section is fairly solid - a logical threat bearing down on the player in an interesting and novel setting. Then the player blasts off and crash lands on a medieval planet, and everything goes straight to hell.

For reasons I can't fathom, the developers take the one unique thing that the game had going for it - a non-standard setting, and then decided to throw that away. By moving the action to a standard fantasy kingdom, complete with magic swords to repair and stricken princesses to cure, they make the game far less interesting by degrees - especially since the fact that the main character is from a far more technologically advanced civilization doesn't factor into the majority of her interactions once she arrives on the planet. What's worse, the one interesting mystery that the kingdom has to offer - why does a low-tech world have robot bartenders and industrial lasers lying around - has its solution spoiled by the game's map, of all things. Just minutes after arriving on the medieval world, the player gets access to a fast-travel map that depicts not only the castle they're trapped in and the surrounding village, but a secret monorail beneath it which leads to a futuristic city destroyed by a cataclysm sometime in the past. This is not how you build a curiosity, developers.

Now, on to the HOG criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

This is absolutely a problem, especially since the game has such a paltry number of Hidden Object Screens, most of which need to be visited twice. Absolutely no thought was put into the logic of what might items might be found in a particular location. The main character's closet on the research base is absolutely overflowing with the kind of random tchotchkes that one would expect to find in another game's haunted mansion. This raises the question of why someone would cart all of this junk halfway across the galaxy space. Naturally, the answer is 'the developers couldn't be bothered to conceptualize the type of junk that would be in a space closet, so they just went with cliched items'. Even worse is a subsequent scene in which a jail cell has a shelf in it fulled to bursting with random junk, much of which proves useful in planning an escape.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

Only in the most basic sense. From time to time the player will need to find an item to unlock something, and then a standard HOS will pop up, allowing them to look for it, as well as fifteen other items that they don't need. Space Legends tries to make things a little more interesting by having items which require assembly,  and while that livens things up a little, it can't cover for the fact that the main character has no use for a target with a bullethole in it, so taking the time to load and fire a flintlock pistol at a piece of paper seems like something of a waste of time. Just once the game attempts to colour outside the lines and offers a multi-stage HOS, in which the player has to find items and use them right there on the screen to unlock the next set of items and task, but the objectives are so poorly explained that it proves more frustrating than innovative.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

Try as the game might, it can't make the puzzles and searches feel like a part of the story. Not that it tries especially hard. Most of the puzzles on display are of the most generic type imaginable - move blocks to slide a crate to the other end of a hall; spin knobs, but doing so causes the other knobs to spin as well. Most egregious is the cloaking device the player is asked to turn on by doing a jigsaw puzzle. It's hard to get more thematically irrelevant than that.

In addition to all of the design failures, the game's presentation is inexcusably sloppy. While I'm aware that the game wasn't developed by English-speaking people, I can't let translation that affects gameplay slide. A brush is not a 'comb'. A lightbulb is not a 'lamp'. An hourglass is not a 'clock'. There are another dozen examples I'm not going to list here. Beyond the bad translation, some of the puzzles are just poorly explained. At one point I was asked to brew a potion by following the steps in a recipe - except three of the ingredients I'd been told to gather didn't appear in said recipe. Which forced me to resort to trial and error to figure out when they were supposed to be used. That's just sloppy.

Here's a puzzle that perfectly illustrates the nonsense players are expected to put up with in Space Legends: The main character must use a crossbow grappling hook to snag a rope bridge so that she can cross it. But she's so bad at shooting that she hits the ceiling instead, knocking down some rocks, as well as the thing that was hidden behind them - the key to a cabinet in the princess' bedroom which contains insulating tape she can just to build a brace to allow her to fire the crossbow more accurately. Why was a key lodged in the ceiling of a secret cave that no one ever goes to? Why does a medieval princess have a roll of insulating tape? Did I seriously just have to go through a series of puzzle steps because the character I'm playing as doesn't know to fire a crossbow at the thing she wants to hit, rather than straight up?

With contrived nonsense, terrible presentation and generic settings ruining all of the goodwill built up in the game's full hour, Space Legends is a nearly-unplayable mess. In a sad final note, the game's end credits offer a possible explanation for its shoddiness. They start with an 'in memorium' photograph of a man who the credits quickly identify as the game's designer and scriptwriter. So it's entirely possible that all of Space Legends' problems owe to it being partially unfinished at the time of its release. That's tragic, but maybe they would have been better off simply dropping the project rather than releasing something this bad.

Space Legends: At the Edge of the Universe is available on Steam